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The Victoria Goodlife Marathon has become a family thanksgiving family tradition for us in the Gale clan. It’s wild to line up with 2400 people in the 8km road race, yah…. The 8k ….There’s no way you could catch this cowboy running 42 clicks on pavement.

The energy walking downtown to the start line at the parliament is electric, the closer you get people start streaming out of every nook and cranny in all assortments of fancy/nerdy running gear.

After wishing Shauna goodluck in the half, and getting sorted into the start corral with Billie and my mom, Bill and I decided that the self seeded start line wasn’t very well self seeded so we promptly elbowed past hundreds of nervous racers to within a few meters of the elite racers, and then we waited.

** No we didn’t run in the cartoon costumes, but I wish we had of **

All 2400 racers counted down the last 10 seconds to the word GO!!!!! The start was the expected bob and weave until racers settled in. I hung in with some pretty badass runner chicks until I dropped and was dropped. The turn around point at 4 km provided an opportunity to eyeball all the competition and the man those guys out in the front were flying.

The race was over pretty fast, I PB’d with a 29:59, Billie finished pretty close behind so we grabbed a chocolate milk and walked back out the course to cheer and cowbell. It was awesome to see all the smiling faces and people out there givin’er, I was especially proud to run with my mom back into the Start/Finish. Not only did the girls race that day, they chefed up an amazing turkey dinner that evening.

Due to a repetitive stress injury I haven’t been getting in much running volume, I’ve mostly been road and mountain biking. One would think that would translate to slower run times but I think the biking has been a good oportinity to get the heartrate abit higher into threshold heart rate zones while keeping my knees happy and motivation high. Hopefully this’ll translate to better over all speed later in the winter….

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Ian obviously forgot to give honorable mention to his mom who at least finished the run (pshaw to time!), survived both the race and a fun filled long weekend without needing to call a paramedic. Signed…anonymous…